Facebook: The Double Edged Sword

Facebook is great. I can post silly things about what's going on in my life and very little people will actually care because they just pass it over and probably wonder why they are friends with me. "Oh right, she's that weird chick from high school who had no friends until like senior year." I've made bold claims on Facebook: I've insulted particular religions, I've cemented friendships and enemies, and I've freaked some of my friends out. I can't make bold claims about my sex life, however, simply because my mom is my friend on Facebook and eventually, it will get to her that I really like sex. Or that certain things would be better with some sex. I can't make bold claims about my sex life because someone will bitch about how I'm a huge whore or something and there goes half of my social life. Someone will want to take that opportunity to bring up a grudge they've been keeping or something and I will have to try to make new friends on top of all that will happen. I can post some pretty ludicrous things and I can make claims that no one will understand, but when it comes down to it, I'm censored. This bothers me.

The only reason I wrote this blog post was because I wanted to say "Earth Hour would have been completely easy (and so much better) if it was a straight hour of sex; too bad it wasn't this year." Yeah, can't really say that on Facebook.

I Don't Game

Recently, I've started playing Starcraft again. Not even like the newest one is coming out and I would love to catch the story, but this game is like 10 years old and I totally remember watching people play this when I was a little girl. The surprising thing is, this is like the third time I've ever tried really getting into it and this time, it's working. Like all the other times, it was because everyone else was doing it. This time is because I seriously think the game is pretty fun.

I've realized that I'm getting used to doing everything on a touch pad. I deeply dislike using mice and if I have to (read: Desktop PC), I try to do as little as I can with the mouse.

This leads me to my next point: I do not play shooters ever. I think it's the combination of my inability to keep a relative calm while playing shooters and the fact that they just don't seem nearly as fun as real time strategy.

But, this all leads me to my title and probably the main topic of this post: I Don't Game. Well, I didn't use to. Well, I did and then I stopped and now I'm doing it again. I guess growing up with three brothers, I watched them game more than I gamed. Then with the advent of party games (Super Smash Brothers, Mario Party, and eventually Warcraft 3), I started to game more. It simply wasn't as fun with two people, so my brothers persuaded me to start playing some of the more easy games. Eventually, I got into the harder games too. It got to the point where I played Nintendo games (because those were mostly for kids) and massively multiplayer online roleplay games because most of them were Asian and in beta test phase and totally free. And that's how it stayed for a while until I stopped. Which very conveniently coincides with me being in this current relationship. And up until just recently, I didn't game. Up until recently, it didn't seem fun. But it is. I just never got to the point where I enjoyed gaming because it is fun; I had always enjoyed the company.

So there: I'm an on-and-off gamer.

Scarlet Bloodmoon

Purple Lightsabre

So Samuel L. Jackson had a conversation with his agent on the role of Mace Windu in the Star Wars film by George Lucas. (Or I would suppose. That's how most actors get into movies right?) I imagine it went something like this:

What do you mean I don't say "muthafucking?!" What's this movie's target audience?

And why would I want the part?

What do you mean I'm the only black guy?! So I don't get to say "muthafucking" and I'm the only person keeping the movie from being another racist Hollywood film? Fuck that shit. So what's the incentive?

Okay, what's the color of my lightsabre?

No. I want it to be something fucking different. Like purple. It'd be like a dick joke.


And that's how Samuel L Jackson got to have a purple lightsabre in the Star Wars movies.

Last year

Last year, I totaled the most posts in January + February. This totally had everything to do with the fact that James started his blog and said he would try to post everyday. It happened for awhile, but he just fell out after a bit. I kept up with him, because, hell, I'm a student with more time and no money. Let's see how far I can go with no one to compete with, but with so much of nothing to talk about.

I've been watching this comedy show on TV called Community. I guess the reason why most people watch it is because the "main" character is kind of attractive and Chevy Chase is in it. Tch. I watch it because Donald Glover is in it. The most recent episode featured Jack Black (who I thought worked nicely as a dysfunctional community college student), and it didn't seem as nicely done as their previous stuff. Black kind of threw off the group cohesion and left more to be desired. Also peeking their heads from the clouds of fame was Owen Wilson. Looks like Community might have gathered up enough fan base for at least another season. Woot. The real reason I caught this episode on TV yesterday rather than on Hulu like in the next week was because DC Pierson had a small part in the episode. Cool, and obviously very reminiscent of the type of geeky artist that he is.

Since I mentioned Wilson, I watched most of "Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" recently. It was a nice, fun, quirky little piece (well, not little), that looked very independent (claymation type digital effects, eccentric subject, etc.) for the star-studded cast list: Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, and Jeff Goldblum just to name a few. Highly recommended for a few good laughs. Very "distraught artist" and very enthralling story-wise.

Since I'm discussing movies: Watched Psycho the other day. Caught about half of the original Alfred Hitchcock one and then the 1990's remake. The remake was shot to be almost identical to the original, and followed pretty much the same script. The movie was kind of slow: the girl they focus the entire exposition on was killed before any real climax. But, considering this is a 40's film, I can see it. Good suspense movie, not quite horror genre.

I've been getting more and more into rap as of late, but only if it's musically brilliant.

Anyways: Off to reading people's blogs!
Scarlet Bloodmoon

A bout of Inspiration

Over the past few days, I've been sleeping in and neglecting all of my duties of "Substitute Maternal Figure" unless prompted to do so. I feel like a horrible mother with anger issues so I take them out on my kids. Maybe when I'm out of college and have a stable sleep schedule and don't stay out until like 1 AM every morning because I haven't seen James all day and that's the only time to see him, I'll be a better mother. But maybe, I'll be the mother who really tries to love her children, but just ends up having lots of sex with her husband and forgets to feed them sometimes.

Apart from sleeping in (and oh, it's glorious sleeping in), I've been reading some old blog posts of some kinda famous dude I've had the fortune to meet, chat with, and walk to his Jetta with. It's been fun, silly, and more and more, I feel like it would have been kickass to have been able to meet him while he was still just a normal person with dreams.

But somehow, I tangented from there. Or maybe it was because of the music I was listening to while reading his blog posts from six years ago. But has there been a moment where you wake up and out of the blue, you feel exactly what's going to happen to you in the future, but you brush it off or misinterpret it? Did you wake up one morning years ago and know how angry you would be today? Did you wake up one morning ages ago and know how much this girl will hurt you? Maybe, you were born with the knowledge of what was going to happen, but choosing to take the adventurous way out, decided to forget just so every moment meant something. Maybe we all innately know what to do and where it goes, but we can't access that stuff until some thick and dark-looking wall breaks down and life gets easy from there. But it's not because we've worked hard in this world, but because we somehow broke down that wall. Or maybe, did you wake up one day so long ago and realize that you'd fall so deeply in love that anything that came into your path was worth getting there and no matter where you ended, everything would be okay?

When I was little, I've always pictured my future romantically. Curled in bed with some nameless and faceless figure but feeling so safe and loved. Standing in a forest clearing next to the same nameless and faceless figure happier than I've ever been. I've never been one to write my first name with the last name of my most prominent crush. I did do that sometimes, but I always ripped those out and destroyed them. That's just not me. It's always been this nameless and faceless template of a man who I would eventually meet, fall in love with, and proceed to spend at least my youth with. I could never come up with a situation where I grew old. It must have been because I was incapable of picturing myself at 18 at the age of 8. I guess I've always been in love with the idea of immortality, because even as the world around me changed, I had all the time in the world to be what I wanted and to explore every whim in the world. When high school came around, the person was still nameless and faceless. I had to force myself to put a name to the figure, I had to force myself to impose a face to the figure. Even in any of my sexual fantasies I would entertain, it was dark, I couldn't really see who was with me. It wasn't until I was in Eindhoven laying in bed with a flare of hormones telling me I really wanted an orgasm that I found myself weaving a fantasy out of someone I already knew. Months after that, I had my first sex dream. The first guy I had intercourse with, I had never committed to memory and probably never met them: a nameless, faceless template. The next guy was the same guy I wove that fantasy out of: James. It is obvious I've moved onto a new chapter of life. Maybe this won't exactly work out like I want it to, but that's okay, because this will always be significant.

I'm about ready to move on from this place. I've been here for seven years now. My room has hardly changed from when it was first set up, and after moving through thousands of color choices for my walls, they remain the white that I've been living with for seven years. It feels like it's time for a new adventure in life. I want to live away from here for just a little while. If it doesn't work out, I'll come back. If I love being out there in the world working my ass off just to stay in a house twice the size of my room and half as comfortable, I'll stay out in the world and visit every Thanksgiving and Christmas just because that's what people do. Or maybe, this desire for adventure is simply a desire to curl in bed with James every night.

So, I just pulled out his senior picture that his mother picked out. It's a shame the photographer didn't catch any of the moments where he was actually laughing. That picture is so fake. I remember that being my first thought when I first saw the thing. My second was that if it wasn't a fake smile, it simply wasn't the ones I saw everyday. It looks like one of his "I'm quietly amused at your expense" smiles, one that I've hardly witnessed, and one that hardly ever came my direction. Or he looks boyish. He never really looks boyish unless he's pouting or talking excitedly in that boyish voice he uses when we are being silly. I remember standing behind the photographer while his mother was sitting just out of the shot. There could be papers written about the psychology of this arrangement. Her superficial presence: so close but still so far from her son. My presence completely absent from the domain of the set, but the photographer used me as the reason to smile. She tried to get him to look genuine, to look really happy. She told him to imagine me in skimpy swim apparel. We laughed. She snapped a few pictures after we stopped laughing. I remember seeing one of my English friends' senior picture she chose to purchase to hand out to people. It was a beautiful picture with her laughing. It fit her so well, it was natural and wonderfully perfect. I wonder why none of the pictures his photographer took fit him nearly as well as the picture of my friend.

It's kind of sad knowing that the only picture of just me that's any good and recent is the one I have as an icon. The one in my yearbook is decent, but the more I look at it, the more I think I look evil or condescending and mean. I'm not the camera-whore type, so I obviously don't have very many pictures where I'm by myself and not trying to capture the exact shade of color my hair is because I just finished dying it. I guess, in some desperate plea for attention or maybe someone to decide I'm pretty or artful, I want some slightly amateur photographer to snap a picture of me with some really old-style almost-black-and-white background and decide it looks artful and that I accent the background well enough for this portrait to be called artful.

On a slightly related note, I've kind of become bored with being "perfect." Maybe it's because besides telling each other we miss each other and love each other, we will do the whole "you're perfect," "no, you're perfect" thing. I realize "perfect" is the nice little umbrella that says I'm cute and soft and nice and caring and so on and so on, but it'd be nice to be reminded every now and then what you think of me, specifically. I've also developed a need for someone to tell me I'm pretty. I'd settle for "pretty," but if anyone throws out a "gorgeous" or "beautiful," I'm like the sad little stray that was finally given the smallest fraction of love and now is purring madly and trying desperately to win a warm meal tonight and a safe place to sleep.

Since I'm talking about what may be considered problems: I'm getting kind of tired of hanging around groups of males under the influence of substances. Ranging anywhere from clingy beyond belief and making me (a very physical person) sick with some form of claustrophobia and mild annoyance, to acting in such a childish way that it makes me not want kids for a good ten years yet, I'm pretty much done hanging out with these people. They're wonderful and interesting people while sober, but GOD. None of them seem to understand that there are more things in life than hitting up every single night and then staying late and eating obscene amounts of food. Probably the worst realization in my life was when my favorite gay friend openly admit that he did not like being sober or couldn't stand not getting high. Wait, are you saying every one of my friends pretty much became psychologically dependent on something I easily left? Me, the person my mother was so worried about because I apparently have an addictive personality, smokes cigarettes socially (meaning like never) but never craves one, and doesn't ever want to get high like the rest of my friends? You've got to be fucking kidding me. Yeah, I smoked marijuana in the Netherlands when I was there. Yeah, I enjoyed the feeling, I enjoyed spending the night high and carefree. I enjoyed killing that whiny goody-goody girl who arrived in Europe in July of 2008. I enjoyed stepping away from that murder scene newborn and ready for a life of living by my own rules. Metaphorically of course.

But I also grew up and decided that it'd be a waste of my life and time if I spent a good deal of it in an altered state of mind forever pushing through life without actually living it. I don't know about the rest of you, but I fantasize about being someone. A large part of this fantasy is being the coolest cat like ever and showing up everyone who's ever made me cry in my life. Ex-boyfriends come and try to make me use them as advertising advisers or hire them or whatever they might be qualified to do and all I tell them is how I don't need them. I show them how cool my company thing is and they walk away like a sad kid who found out the candy store was just closed forever. Another very important part is the part where I have the coolest custom house ever and I could seriously spend every night of the week in a different bedroom without overlapping or reusing bedrooms. Half of them would never be used unless I had a whole ton of guests over for some sleep-over event, but hey, I have a whole shit ton of rooms in this really cool house I can afford because I worked towards not only a goal that makes me money, but I love my job and I love doing the things I do and helping the people I help. So I guess, in some twisted way, fantasy is my anti-drug and the scary DARE adviser of this metaphor is that I really want to be someone.

Late

I know I'm late, like super late, but I'll start a post in the middle of class or something, and then the professor would talk about something super interesting or something that will be on the test and I have to pay attention. Then, I will forget completely about the poor post I've written and then leave.

There's a lot of stuff that has happened. I'm now 19. It's weird because someone asked yesterday and I automatically responded with 18. Nope! I'm not 18 anymore. Um...But let's start at like "the beginning."

I have no idea where I left off, but the really cool thing that happened to me back in November was going to see Mystery Team three times while it was here. Mystery Team is the first full-length feature film from the group Derrick Comedy and it was beyond wonderful. On the second showing I caught, a group of friends and I got the chance to hang out for a bit with one of the co-writers/actors, DC Pierson. He was a really genuine guy with great comedy skills. Like, when you meet famous people, the stereotype or expectation is to find that they are jerks or that they are really not the type of people you'd think they are. Nope. This guy was as funny in real life as he is in all of the Derrick Comedy stuff, and just as funny as we all thought he would be. I've recently gone through some of his older writing, like stuff from 2003 in blog posts, and it's a goldmine of wonderful things. He grew up in the Phoenix Metropolitan and had attended ASU, so all of this stuff that I've been reading has been more relate-able than some random famous dude that I'm slightly cyber-stalking.

Our favorite gay friend came back from Vermont in December. That was super exciting. We hung out like we always did, joked about and discussed sexuality, sex, and teenage things in general. The running joke is that we all have sex with this gay friend of ours, except for Princess who is completely afraid of homosexuality. He pretty much spent a good solid month back with us and we were deeply sorry to see him have to leave. He has the best menagerie of people for his get-togethers.

I got sick the day after my birthday. Like fever and OMG I'M GOING TO THROW UP ON YOUR FACE sick. This pretty much stayed with me for two days. Ugh. Missed some dinner and lunch invitations that sounded pretty interesting.

BUT: for Christmas/winter holiday I have no obligation to celebrate, James and I pretty much got each other the same thing. We both gave each other a new wallet since we both needed to switch out our old ones for new ones anyways.

On the 27th, my family packed into our '98 Sienna to drive to Vegas. This took us a good 8 hours maybe, because my family likes to take their time and mozy. And Hoover Dam traffic was horrible and we were stuck there for like two hours. We checked into the Stratosphere, which is a nice place to stay, and grabbed dinner at the buffet there. Meats were kind of dry and food kind of bland, but none of us where terribly hungry or picky. I got my own bed on a trip for pretty much the first time I can remember (with family). The next day, we went to the Chinatown for some breakfast before getting ready to go to a wedding. It was a nice wedding. The place was very nice and elegant, nice open bar, great snack foods, nummy cake. Throughout the entire wedding, the only memory I could remember of the groom was going to visit their family when I was like 9 for Christmas-ish and spending time playing with them. And I couldn't help but remember how I have this slightly recurring crush on his brother. But anyways: I caught the bouquet, but only because it fell to the floor and no one seemed to want it. Okay. Banquet was a really elaborate Chinese feast. It was epic and enormous and holy shit, there was so much food. That was Vegas: not nearly as dramatic as my last Vegas experience, and not nearly as scandalous.

I finally got to pass the year with James. Last year, I was off in Flagstaff while he was still down in the Valley. This year, we went over to our beloved gay friend's place and it was the three of us and his dad counting down. Great fun, slept over for the night, and got to cuddle with James in what feels like forever.

Now, all the other kiddies, except Jeremy, are in school, and I pretty much have the house to myself. James is now a salesman for fancy cutlery and is in Scottsdale for that bit. I have yet to get a job, but I might as well be a collector of financial aid/scholarships that I'm eligible for as employment. I mentioned moving out today to my father and he pretty much said that is was a stupid idea and that I would be able to live a more luxurious life living at home. Well, but I think it'd be nice to live not at home. Maybe try this out for a little and know just how much you need me and how much I need you. I'm thinking of applying to the Honors College, but the application process leads me to think that it's too late as a Lower Division student and I'll have to wait for Upper Division student-status. That's fine: I don't need your fancy Honors degree. I'll just wait for it.

Now, for something completely unrelated:

A couple of days ago, I had this really weird dream where I was pretty much flirting with this Asian guy I've probably never seen in my life. I woke up and while pondering this dream, realized that most of the guys I've had crushes on in my life were Asian (at least the recurring/hardcore ones where they last more than a few months), but I've only ended up mostly dating Caucasian guys. Weird. It kind of makes me wonder why I'm weird like that.

-Realizing How Great I've Got It
Scarlet Bloodmoon

Why Did I Turn My Back on Music?

Three years ago, I stopped playing the violin on a regular basis. Shortly after that, the fingerboard collapsed. Even if I wanted to pull out my beautiful instrument, I can't play it. Last year, I brought home a cello. I played it a little, but I never got into it. I've stopped playing music. The only amount I do now is watch my 9 year old brother play the piano and show him how to play the new songs. I've learned how to sight read very well over these seven years, but I can't play anymore. Five years ago, I thought having an electric violin would be the coolest thing ever. I loved how they defied the conventional shape to produce the full sound. They just looked really cool.

I guess, in a way, I've never really separated myself from music, I just kind of stopped making it. It kind of depresses me now that I've stopped playing the violin. It would be great if I could go back to playing it.

Last night, I went to the Trans Siberian Orchestra concert. I guess they kind of do symphonic rock and medley lots of classical and typically orchestral pieces with guitars, electric bass, and drums. It was a fun show: the music was wonderful, but the Christmas-y part was a little too much. They opened with a piece that eventually segued into Farandole and it made me realize just how much I miss being able to play for fun.

Maybe I got too busy to play my violin after awhile. I was doing so many things, trying to find myself, define the world, and exist that I didn't have the time to learn to love the way 440 Hertz felt as the vibrations brushed across my skin. Maybe it's that I resigned myself to being not that great for so long that I forced myself into the perpetual bit of doubt. Maybe I had never truly appreciated the timbre of a violin and it was only after I found myself so excited to hear a song intro in violin that I realized this. It's such a distinct sound with so many faces and emotions. I miss it.

-Promoting Music in all the Weird Places

Scarlet Bloodmoon